A Jenga Story

In 2008, my family and I were part of a work project organized by the Catalyst Foundation, which does sustained work with communities of severe poverty in Vietnam, the kind of poverty out of which international adoptions like our own daughter's arise. After ten days working side by side with families and children in several project communities, Catalyst had organized a "camp" weekend at the beach for the kids. As part of it, we offered a series of games and activities that would permit interaction between people and especially kids without much language in common. My job was running the "Jenga" table. The game attracted a steady stream of kids, who loved it. Their mood was exuberant, and they cheered me on as I used my minimal Vietnamese to count off the number as kids removed each successive jenga piece. There was lots of joking and great giggles when the stack inevitably collapsed. Then a young girl named Nguyen Truc Ngan, about 13 years old, approached the table. She confronted the stack of blocks and set about the game with a kind of deliberate seriousness that hadn't been seen before. A crowd grew around her, watching in hushed silence. As she removed piece after piece, she seemed to become more and more deliberate, focused, and determined. She continued until she had broken the previous record by four or five pieces, and reached about the maximum level possible. Then the stack finally collapsed, and for the first time she looked up in triumph, and cracked the broadest smile I've ever seen. This is a girl who lives in abject poverty, and who had never been to school until she was brought into the program Catalyst has helped to start in her community. What may Nyugen Truc Ngan become and accomplish? The qualities so stunning in the pictures of her playing Jenga shout out an answer--just about anything, given half a chance in this world!